Just One Bite

by Jack Heath

  “It’s called being an entrepreneur,” she adds.

  I would have called it freelancing, but whatever. One of the nicest things about Texas is how far it is from Silicon Valley, but that distance seems to shrink every day.

  “I assume you tell your employers about your criminal record?” Thistle says.

  “If they ask,” Black says warily.

  “Do these jobs ever require you to get in someone else’s car?”

  Black hesitates. “Maybe. If I’m washing it, I guess.”

  “In the past month, have you been in the car of someone who didn’t employ you?”

  Black looks even more cagey now. “I’m not sure.”

  “If you have, it would make sense to tell us.”

  “Look,” Black says. “Sometimes you need to give a ride to get a ride, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Elaborate,” Thistle says.

  “I live outside the loop. Once or twice I’ve needed someone to take me home. A cab would have bankrupted me. But if I can find a straight dude with a car, I have another way of paying.” She glares at us. “That’s not illegal, by the way. No money changed hands.”

  I wonder if she’s telling the truth about that.

  “These jobs,” I say. “The paid jobs. Are they recorded? You can tell us where and when each one was?”

  “Why?”

  Cards on the table time. “Because the car of one of the Crawdad Man’s victims turned up at a dump in Louisiana with your DNA inside,” I say. “A witness can put a woman matching your description at the crime scene. Another witness saw someone—also matching your description—pick up a separate victim from his home.”

  Black has gone pale. “That wasn’t me,” she says. “I never visited any dump.”

  “Let’s say a man propositions you,” Thistle says.

  “I never took any money.”

  Thistle ignores this. “He says it’s his birthday. He’s got some cash fresh from the ATM. You agree to help him out. But he has some weird role-play thing going on—he wants to pretend you’re a giant. And he’s rougher than you were expecting. So you panic. You do something...regrettable.”

  Black looks from Thistle to me and back. “This is all bullshit,” she says.

  “Sex workers get treated like shit,” Thistle says. “They get robbed, assaulted—”

  “I’m not a sex worker anymore.”

  “They get targeted by serial killers. Sometimes men do things the hooker didn’t consent to—they see it as theft rather than rape. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman fought back, found herself with a dead body on her hands. And maybe a little extra spending money.”

  “Jesus,” Black says. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Let’s start on January 9 last year,” I say.

  “Sure. Give me back my phone, and I’ll tell you exactly what I was doing.”

  It takes a minute to get her phone back from the front desk. We watch over her shoulder, making sure she doesn’t erase anything.

  She doesn’t. And she works seven-day weeks—her movements look very well accounted for. On January 9, the first day Biggs marked on the calendar, she was shoveling someone’s driveway. On February 13, the day before Valentine’s, she was buying and delivering roses on behalf of disorganized husbands.

  March 19 simply said, Hair.

  Thistle points to this. “What was that?”

  “Oh,” Black says. “Yeah, that was a weird one. Someone wanted to buy my hair.”

  A chill runs up my spine.

  “Buy your hair?” Thistle repeats.

  “Yeah. They wanted a natural blond, at least ten inches, no split ends. When I got to her place, I actually recognized her. Another one of Warner’s girls, but she left before I did. I don’t remember her name. It was a good gig, though. She paid three hundred bucks.”

  “How much of your hair did she take?”

  “All of it. She shaved me down to the scalp. She was very careful. I felt bad for her. I figured she’d just found out she had cancer. Why else would you be willing to pay so much for a blond wig?”

  “A wig,” I say.

  “Yeah. I told her she could buy one from a shop, but she said she wanted to make it herself.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  A car has two occupants.

  The passenger is the father of the driver’s son. How?

  “You want me to try to get a list of Charlie Warner’s past employees?” Vasquez says, eyes wide.

  “Right,” Thistle says.

  For a moment, the only sound is the humming of computers and the whir of the AC.

  Vasquez stands up, glaring at us both. I know how he feels. I don’t like the direction this case has taken, either. If Warner hears that I’ve made this request, I’m a dead man.

  “And how exactly am I supposed to do that?” he asks.

  “You’re keeping tabs on her already, right?” Thistle says. “I figured you’d have one ready to go.”

  “It’s a highly sensitive investigation. Information like that is only accessible to people on the task force.”

  “Well, we need it. Do you want to tell the director, or should I?”

  Vasquez sighs. Rubs his face in his hands. “Fine, I’ll do it. But anything you find, you tell me first.”

  “Done. How did you go with our suspect’s phone?”

  “Uh...” Vasquez sits back down and digs up a graph on his computer. “Cell tower data doesn’t take her anywhere near the dump site within the last three months. But it’s possible she didn’t take her phone with her when she went.”

  “Or had it switched off,” I say.

  “No. She’s rebooted a few times, but hasn’t left it switched off for more than a couple of minutes since she acquired it two years ago.”

  “Can you see where she was on March 19?”

  Vasquez brings it up. “Three addresses. One is her home, one is a shopping center and the third...” He types up a quick search. “The third one is a condemned apartment building. Can’t tell you which unit she was in.”

  “How long has it been condemned?”

  “Three years.”

  Which means Black only thought she was visiting the home of the wigmaker. Or she was lying to us.

  “Okay,” I say. “What about her freelance career?”

  Vasquez brings up Black’s profile on the job site. “She did all the jobs she said she did—at least, she accepted them, got paid for them and got excellent public feedback for them.”

  “No doubt,” Thistle says dryly. “How about Luxford’s computer?”

  “Still nothing. The letters on the Post-it note weren’t the password, and I can’t decrypt the hard drive without it. Any other ideas for what it might be?”

  Thistle shakes her head.

  “Show me the computer again,” I say.

  Vasquez leads us over to one of the computers, which I recognize as the one from Shannon’s place.

  “It looks like he’s used AES-256 to encrypt the hard drive,” he says. “It’s a symmetric encryption algorithm which uses a block cipher, so I’ll never break it with today’s technology.”

  “But it was encrypted with current tech, right?” Thistle says. “Luxford isn’t a visitor from the future?”

  Vasquez doesn’t laugh. “Decryption is always years behind encryption. That’s what makes encryption useful for criminals, and a pain in the ass for us. But Luxford’s ISP is cooperating, so we know he used a Tor. You know about Tor?”

  “Yes,” Thistle says.

  “No,” I say, not wanting to appear too knowledgeable. I used to sell credit card numbers on the dark web.

  “It’s a secure web browser originally developed by the navy,” Vasquez says. “Typically, when you’re browsing with a Tor, the only thing an outsid
er can tell is that you’re using a Tor. They can’t tell what sites you’re visiting or what you’re doing on them.”

  “The navy released it to the public, right?” Thistle says.

  Vasquez nods. “So they could use it without anyone knowing it was them. Anyway, Tor gets you to the dark web. Which is where you go if you want to tip off a journalist about NSA wiretapping. Or to buy drugs, or hire a hit man, or look at child pornography.”

  “So what was Luxford doing?”

  “I don’t know. He accessed the dark web only twice, almost a year ago. My best guess, based on Abbey Chapman’s testimony, is that he made a friend there, and then started swapping videos with the friend by mail.”

  Fred.

  “Why not keep using the dark web?” I ask.

  “Because the cops might notice. We can’t see what people are doing on the dark web, but we can tell they’re on it. Whereas a USB stick in the mail isn’t too suspicious. It might get X-rayed, but not read. We did find a USB stick, but it’s encrypted, too.”

  I stare at the Post-it note, still stuck to the computer. MTEDUFIHCRPFO. Impossible to remember, unless you’ve had plenty of practice memorizing random letters. Easier to just write it down, like he did. But what for, if it’s not the password?

  “Bring up the log-in screen,” I say.

  Vasquez does. “We can’t just guess,” he said. “After two more wrong attempts, the hard drive will erase itself.”

  Thirteen letters. I close my eyes and think back to the wheel cipher on Luxford’s desk, back at the college. Thirteen discs. The configuration meaningless.

  “What do you have in mind?” Thistle asks me.

  “Hang on.” I didn’t have time to memorize the order of the letters on every disc, and I only saw the wheel cipher from one side. But I think I have just enough. In my head, I rotate the discs, lining up the letters from the Post-it note: MTEDUFIHCRPFO.

  And there it is, on the row just above. A message in plain English.

  I open my eyes. “Try show me the pain,” I tell Vasquez. “All one word.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” I look at Thistle. “He used his wheel cipher. The thing on his desk.”

  Thistle squeezes my shoulder as Vasquez types it in.

  A message pops up: Incorrect password. One attempt remaining.

  “Shit,” Thistle says. “Sorry, Blake.”

  “Was that upper case, or lower case?” I ask Vasquez.

  “Lower case.”

  “Try upper.” All the letters on the cipher were capitals.

  “Really? If you’re wrong, we lose everything.”

  “Do it,” I say.

  Vasquez looks at Thistle for confirmation. She nods. He crosses himself and turns back to the keyboard. Types it in.

  I hold my breath.

  He hits Enter.

  Welcome, Shannon!

  “Mother of God,” Vasquez says.

  “Ha!” Thistle slaps me on the back, grinning. “You did it!”

  I exhale, my hands shaking. It feels good to show off in front of Thistle. “What’s in there?”

  Vasquez is bringing up a file directory. There are hundreds of videos. He hesitates before clicking the first one.

  “What?” I ask.

  “A guy with an encrypted hard drive, a Tor browser and ‘show me the pain’ as his password probably has some pretty bad videos in his collection,” Vasquez says.

  “No shit,” Thistle says. “You remember we found a young woman being held prisoner in his house?”

  “I’m just saying, whatever this is, maybe you don’t want to see it.”

  The excitement has faded from Thistle’s face. “We have to.”

  “I can get someone to transcribe it for you. These guys—” Vasquez gestures at the other desks, although they’re all empty “—they’re trained to watch this kind of thing. They get regular counseling to make sure it doesn’t mess with their heads.”

  Thistle looks at me.

  I nod. Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve seen worse. Done worse.

  “We can handle it,” she says. “Show us.”

  * * *

  Vasquez is right. It’s bad.

  Thistle and I walk out of Vasquez’s office, our steps heavy. Ride the elevator up in silence. I find myself looking forward to even the meager daylight outside.

  Thistle looks shaken. So am I, although I didn’t expect to be.

  It wasn’t the blood that got to me. I’ve seen plenty of blood in my life. It was the agony. The confusion. Hours and hours of screaming. People turned into animals by their own terror. And the eagerness of the gloved hands, which I assume belonged to Fred.

  The videos confirmed our worst fears about what Shannon is into. But it didn’t tell us anything about where he might be. And none of the people in the videos we saw—we watched a small sample of each one—look like any of the victims we know about. So either Fred isn’t the Crawdad Man, or he’s prolific.

  “How does a person even get a fetish for that?” Thistle says finally.

  “Maybe fetish is the wrong word,” I say. “I saw some true crime on his bookshelf. He might have started out with slasher movies, and then moved on to reading about real killers, and now nothing shocks him except...that. Maybe he’s addicted to being horrified.”

  “I bet that’d be a real comfort to the victims.”

  A terrified face flashes through my head. Echoes of a scream. I shake it loose.

  We reach the doors. It’s raining, the air not quite cold enough to turn the droplets into snowflakes. Thistle’s car is a short walk away, but we’re likely to be drenched.

  “I don’t think he’s shocked at all,” she says. “I bet he thinks it’s funny. Like a school bully who laughs when he sees someone else getting beat up.”

  This whole case is a mess. We have dozens of victims now, with less and less in common. Several suspects—Luxford, Fred, Warner, the wigmaker—with unclear motivations and unknown locations.

  The one thing we knew about the woman we were looking for was that she was blonde. Now we don’t even know that. Armana Black said the woman who bought her hair was a brunette, but that it might not have been natural.

  Thistle is evidently thinking along the same lines. “I don’t think Black has anything to do with those missing men,” Thistle says. “You?”

  “Just a hardworking entrepreneur,” I say, relieved by the change of subject.

  “You think she was telling the truth about her ex-colleague?”

  “Could be. You weren’t wrong in there. Hookers are treated like dirt, and violence leads to violence. I can see one of Warner’s girls snapping, and killing seventeen men.”

  “With Luxford’s help?”

  “That’s the part that doesn’t make sense,” I say. “He’s a rapist, and she must have known it. Why would they team up?”

  “Maybe they knew each other some other way. Old friends? Relatives?”

  “I don’t think...” I trail off.

  “What?” Thistle asks.

  “What if she’s one of the women he’s been blackmailing?”

  Thistle looks doubtful. “There’s a big difference between making someone give you a ride and making them kill seventeen people.”

  “I meant the other way,” I say. “She killed them, he found out about it and he’s been extorting her ever since. Maybe that’s why Biggs doesn’t fit the victim profile. Luxford made her kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe because Biggs knew what he’d done to Hope. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, we’ll know when we find him.”

  We look out at the pouring rain. We’re still huddled in the doorway like smokers.

  “You remember last night...” Thistle begins.

  “Yes,�
�� I say immediately.

  She grins. “That’s great, but I wasn’t finished. You remember how I said I couldn’t hold down a normal job?”

  “Right. Me neither, for the record.”

  “Well, I feel better about it now. At least I never had to sell my own hair to get by.”

  I laugh. “I’d buy your hair.”

  “You would, huh?”

  “Yeah. You’ve got great hair.”

  She chuckles. “How much? Maybe I’m open to it, after all.”

  “Fifty bucks.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Per strand. Just let me mortgage my house first.”

  Thistle shoves my shoulder, smiling. “All right, that’s enough.”

  I hug myself for warmth. Even standing near the closed door is cold. After a second, she puts her arm around me.

  “Until Vasquez gets that list of Warner’s ex-employees,” she says, “there’s nothing to do but wait.”

  I nod. I can’t think of any other leads to pursue.

  After a pause, she says, “My roommate is probably home. How about we wait at your place?”

  The tub’s empty. The stuff in the freezer is covered.

  “Sounds good,” I say.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  What stinks when alive but smells good when dead?

  The sex is better the second time. Less hurried, maybe. We make it to my actual bed, and we have the patience to get completely undressed, to kiss each other all over, to try a few positions and find each other’s rhythm. It feels less like it’s our only chance, now. Or maybe I’m just less scared that I’ll lose control and bite her.

  I wonder if it will keep improving forever. Surely not. It’s gotta peak somewhere. We can’t still be having the best sex of our lives in our eighties. Our hips wouldn’t take it. Mine can barely take it now.

  It’s weird to think of Thistle as an eighty-year-old woman, knitting in a rocking chair on her porch. Weirder still to think of me beside her. But it feels more possible with every passing day. When we finally fall asleep, I dream that we’re on a little boat, out in Galveston Bay. The sun makes the sea sparkle. Thistle is reading a book, while I keep my eyes to the horizon, watching dark clouds creep in.